Instagram And Twitter Integration: What Are Your Options?

With Twitter and Instagram now in a position of rivalry, since Facebook bought the photo-sharing app, the pair has slowly been killing off ways in which users can integrate their Instagram and Twitter experiences. Instagram recently pulled a pretty significant Twitter-related feature. You can no longer see Instagram’s vintage-filtered photos displayed automatically in your Twitter feed. Instead, users will have to take that extra step of clicking on the link to view the image. While that might not like seem like a big deal to some, it’s still pretty frustrating to have a convenient feature taken away like that.

Luckily there are a few workarounds that will make it possible to keep viewing your Instagram photos – be it filtered images of your breakfast or something a little more serious – in your Twitter timeline.

The IFTTT Recipe

The easiest way to get Instagram photos right back into Twitter comes to us courtesy of an IFTTT user. It’s as simple as creating a recipe on IFTTT. You might recall that IFTTT was another service that took a serious hit from Twitter. You can no longer use Twitter as the original source for your recipes, but you can still use it as the destination. For Instagram users, this is good news.

The recipe goes like this: If you post an image to Instagram, using a specific tag, it will automatically be posted as an image to Twitter. Rather than use the Instagram link, IFTTT converts the link into a Twitter link. The added bonus of using this recipe means you can continue to selectively post the images of your choice to Twitter, rather than inundate your timeline with all of your Instagram photos.

Cross-Post to Tumblr

If you’re already sharing your Instagram photos through Tumblr, this option only requires one additional step. If you haven’t already connected Tumblr to your Instagram account, you can easily do this in the app’s settings. Once you’ve got posting to Tumblr set up, you simply have to create a second connection through Tumblr and Twitter.

In Tumblr’s settings, make sure you switch Twitter sharing on in order for this to work. Once you upload a photo to Instagram, and share it on Tumblr from within the app, it will be viewable in Twitter much the same way Instagram used to be.

Just be sure to remember to turn Tumblr sharing on when you’re posting the image to Instagram.

Upload it Straight to Twitter

This might not be the most ideal of ways to get your Instagram photos on Twitter, but you can automatically choose to save your Instagram photos to your camera roll. Once it’s been uploaded to Instagram, the filtered version will be saved to your camera roll. You can then just fire up your Twitter app and upload the image straight to Twitter.

This obviously not the slickest method available, but at the end of the day, if all you want is an easy way to share your ‘Instagram-ed’ photos with your Twitter followers, it certainly gets the job done.

Have you come up with any handy ways to get your Instagram photos showing up in your Twitter feed? Let us know in the comments.

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BestGeeK

Rekish

January 4, 2013

you forgot Stipple (www.stipple.com). You can import, tag and tweet… really cool. Comes with analytics too.

Nancy Messieh

January 6, 2013

It does look like a pretty cool service – the only thing that’s missing is for it to auto-import your IG photos after you’ve connected it the first time. Definitely worth a look though. Thanks for the suggestion!